Faith and reason -- Christianity; Immortality -- Christianity; Tragic, The -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
"With the same bodies and souls that they had," as the Catechism says.
So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of
the blessed is not perfectly complete until they recover their bodies.
They lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malón de Chaide of the
Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,[17] and "this lament
springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the
soul is there; and although they cannot suffer, because they see God, in
whom they unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they
are not wholly content. They will be so when they are clothed with their
own bodies."
And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ
corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic
piety--the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of
Christ, which is the bread of immortality.
This sacrament is genuinely realist--_dinglich_, as the Germans would
say--which may without great violence be translated "material." It is
the sacrament most genuinely _ex opere operato_, for which is
substituted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word.
Fundamentally it is concerned with--and I say it with all possible
respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the
phrase--the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding
upon Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was
communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and in the second year
of her being Prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the
Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another
sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of
Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, "for I had told him how
much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that
the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole
and entire in the smallest particle." Here reason pulls one way, feeling
another. And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one
difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of
this sacrament? What is a divine body? And the body, in so far as it is
the body of Christ, is it divine? What is an immortal and immortalizing
body? What is substance separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have
greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there
were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality
of God Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us.
And this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing sacrament _par
excellence_, and therefore the axis of popular Catholic piety, and if it
may be so said, the most specifically religious of sacraments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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